What Obama Should Be Pushing For On Immigration

The president is preparing to do an odd thing today. He is flying to Las Vegas in order to deliver what is described as a "campaign-style" speech in support of somebody else's ideas on how to reform the country's immigration system, which happens to be an issue on which the president campaigned vigorously at hundreds of "campaign-style" events during two actual campaigns. Today, however, according to the best available reporting, the president is going to deliver a stemwinder in support of the plan devised in the Senate by a coalition that includes various ambitious Democrats and those few Republicans who do not believe that planned obsolescence is an effective long-term strategy.

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Mr. Obama differs with the group on some key issues, notably whether to make a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants conditional on further tightening the nation's borders. But administration officials said Monday evening that the principles in the Senate proposal were largely consistent with those in Mr. Obama's 29-page blueprint for immigration reform, which he issued in May 2011 and made a plank of his re-election campaign. The president's goal, the officials said, will be less to underline differences with the bipartisan plan than to marshal public support behind immigration reform. Mr. Obama, having failed to achieve that in his first term, has put it at the top of his second-term agenda.

Unless the president sharply draws those differences he has with the Senate plan, which would seem to be against the general tenor of what he's reportedly planning to say, then, as nearly as I can tell, the current Senate proposal is going to stand as the extreme left of the debate going forward. Which is to say that the respectable liberal position in the congressional debates is going to be a complicated path to citizenship, and one that is going to depend on whatever people get appointed to that border security commission. All the action, all the amending, all the red-pencilling thereafter will take place to the starboard of that position. It seems to me that, if the president were to stake out clearly a path to citizenship that were easier and less complex than the one in the Senate bill, then there would be room to debate a middle ground between that proposal and the one put forward by the Gang Of Whatever yesterday. Now, though, if the president simply states a mild preference, but spends most of his time praising the Gang Of Whatever for its bipartisan leadership, the debate begins a few degrees left of dead center and then moves from there.

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And that's before it gets to (gulp!) The House Of Representatives.

Josh Marshall's place is doing a good job today explaining what "amnesty" is going to mean in real political terms as this debate proceeds. In brief, "amnesty" is going to mean whatever political expedience demands that it mean at any one moment. There is no question that the current Senate proposal contains a form of amnesty, even though its so riddled with bureaucratic hoops to jump through that it's probably best described as Amnesty By DMV. It's certainly clear enough to Republicans anxious to find a way to bash the president on the issue while not completely alienating a bloc of voters capable of rendering Republicans irrelevant for the next few decades. Lindsey Graham popped up on Fox last night and, with the gallows of a primary plain in his eyes, Huckleberry tried desperately hard to thread this very needle. But nobody tap-danced more entertainingly than our old friend from the weekend, Congress Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, whom the TPM crew caught on MSNBC today talking just long enough to back her position up over her own feet.

"I think that what we need to do is very carefully look at what this pathway is going to be. We have to make certain that there is not going to be an amnesty that encourages more amnesty."

Oh.

The fact is that "amnesty" is one of those conjuring words so common on the embattled Right these days. It is a magic spell that calls up visions out of the vicious enthusiasms of the Republican base. It has no real meaning there except in the visions that arise from it — headless bodies in the desert, useful fears in the electorate, the odd Muslim with a Stinger missile slipping across into El Paso stashed away in a Mexican drug gang or as part of the Salvadoran Mafia, an America unrecognizable to real Americans. (Michelle Malkin, in particular, has been whippingthis peculiar cauldron into a fine froth ever since the Senate plan was announced.) Republican politicians want to keep the conjuring word and distance themselves from the noxious spells it casts.

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For example, look at the reactionof Steve King, the fanatic from Iowa who may want to run for Senate, and seems to be realizing belatedly that being entirely batshit crazee in public may not be the way to do that. His entire statement on the Senate plan is a festering pool of xenophobic code beneath a thin veneer of recently acquired quasi-sanity. The people he's trying to fool see the veneer. The people he's always represented see what they want to see beneath it.

I would ask the Senators, do you agree with me that the United States should have an enforced immigration policy designed to enhance the economic, social, and cultural well being of the United States of America? Do you believe the Rule of Law and national sovereignty are essential components of a successful nation? Do you believe employers should be allowed to deduct wages and benefits paid to illegal aliens as a business expense? I'm guessing the 'Gang of Eight' would be inclined to agree with me on my principles. But, I predict that they will oppose my every effort to get them into law.

"Cultural well-being" is code. So is "national sovereignty." (The sovereignty of the United States is threatened by an army of gardeners, nannies and underpaid meatpackers?) As King's statement makes clear, there is no real way to do what he's trying to do without sounding like a fool or a hypocrite. The Republicans are looking to get on the right side of the demographics without losing the political energy they've always drawn from the wrong side. Which is the great leverage that the president holds in this business, if he chooses to use it, but which is not used to its full advantage in the Senate's proposal. He should push them, too.

UPDATE -- The president's speech in Las Vegas was shrewdly non-specific. Meanwhile, Marco Rubio found it necessary to reassure a talk-radio host that he's keeping the faith, And the rodeo begins.

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